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Speaker 1: from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. I
Speaker 1: am Marshall Brain with today's question what is a tiny house?
Speaker 1: And how can you build a house for thirty five dollars?
Speaker 1: Houses in the United States have been getting bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger for decades. If you go back to nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: the average single family home in the United States was
Speaker 1: about a thousand square feet. Today it's more than twice
Speaker 1: that big square feet. The tiny house movement is a
Speaker 1: radical departure from this trend. Houses in this category get
Speaker 1: as small as sixty five square feet more. Typically, they
Speaker 1: fall somewhere in the hundred to two hundred square foot range.
Speaker 1: The idea is to create a very compact space so
Speaker 1: that you can simplify your life and greatly reduce expenses.
Speaker 1: The interior of a tiny house often shares some features
Speaker 1: with boats and r vs. For example, if you're compressing
Speaker 1: a house into a hundred square feet, the kitchen and
Speaker 1: the restroom are going to be very small. Boats and
Speaker 1: r vs work with this same kind of constraint, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times you can find appliances or bathroom
Speaker 1: fixtures from boats and r vs that work well in
Speaker 1: tiny houses. Right now, I'm looking at the floor plan
Speaker 1: for a tiny house called the Popomo. It is eight
Speaker 1: and a half feet wide and twenty ft long, about
Speaker 1: a hundred and seventy square feet. It has four rooms,
Speaker 1: a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a great room.
Speaker 1: There's also a coat closet. The great room is five
Speaker 1: by nine or forty five square feet, the bedroom is
Speaker 1: seven by five or thirty five square feet. The bathroom
Speaker 1: is only fifteen square feet two ft wide, and the
Speaker 1: kitchen and the closet take up the rest of the space.
Speaker 1: As tiny houses go, this one is pretty spacious, but
Speaker 1: you can see how compact a tiny house usually is.
Speaker 1: Tiny houses often run a foul with building codes. For example,
Speaker 1: a typical building code might require at least one room
Speaker 1: to be a hundred and twenty square feet and all
Speaker 1: other rooms to be of a certain size. To get
Speaker 1: around these requirements, most tiny houses are built as trailers
Speaker 1: with wheels so they're easy to tow around. But to
Speaker 1: create a towable trailer, there are usually width restrictions. This
Speaker 1: is why most tiny houses are less than nine ft wide.
Speaker 1: Many people who build tiny houses pride themselves on the
Speaker 1: low cost of construction. One video on YouTube shows a
Speaker 1: tiny house complete with trailers and wheels, built for only
Speaker 1: three thousand five dollars. How is this possible? The answer
Speaker 1: is recycling. If you get on Craigslist or free cycle,
Speaker 1: visit demolition projects, and look for building material recycling shops,
Speaker 1: you can find us stuff like lumber, windows, doors, and
Speaker 1: cabinets at very very low prices or even free. These
Speaker 1: materials greatly reduced the cost of a tiny house. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, does that
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